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Jeweled Heart Mouse – $19.95
Valentine’s Day is nearly here! What do you get the geekheart who has everything? The Jeweled Heart Mouse from the NeatoShop. This adorable wired computer mouse, shaped like a heart, is encrusted with acrylic rhinestones. Bling!
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more heartfelt Valentine’s Day gifts!
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Two
mice meet in a narrow plastic tube that's not wide enough for both of them.
That sounds like the opening of a really bad science joke, but stick with
me. The punchline is downright amazing:
One of them must give way. In their earlier encounter, the first mouse exerted its dominance by forcing its rival to reverse down the tube. This time, things are different; the second mouse pulls rank and the first one backs down.
Mouse hierarchies don’t change this readily, but the second mouse has been given a boon by Fei Wang at the Chinese Academy of Science. By injecting a single gene into one part of its brain, Wang turned the subordinate animal into a dominant one.The gene that gave the mouse a burst of social mobility is GluR4. It creates part of a protein called the AMPA receptor, which allows signals to flow quickly between two neurons. By injecting extra GluR4 into a mouse’s brain, and producing more AMPA receptors, Wang strengthened the connections between its neurons. The effect is like building expressways between two cities overnight – you can have a much larger and faster flow of traffic between them. [...]
By manipulating this signalling, he could push mice up or down the social ladder. With an extra dose of GluR4, the mice gained social standing. When they confronted other mice in a cramped plastic tube, they were more likely to force their rivals to retreat, even if they had previously given way. With their new rank, they were also more likely to court female mice with high-pitched ultrasonic songs.
Photo: Tessa Angus
What do you do if you've got your hands on thousands of mouse skulls
(rescued from owl excrements vomit, no less)? Well, taxidermy artist Alastair
Mackie has got the elegant solution. Izzy Elstob of Don't Panic writes:
Downstairs again, Mackie uses the repetition of form to create the series Untitled (Sphere). These are four perfect spheres within thick-set display bell jars, apparently floating upon their plinths. I forgot to mention that these perfect spheres are meticulously composed of mouse skulls. I forgot to mention that these mouse skulls are meticulously extracted from owl shit. What you have is a skeletal ball of precise dimensions, the layers of the ball packed with equidistantly placed skulls of increasing or diminishing size dependent on whether the convex is moving towards or away from the poles.
Link - via Archie McPhee's Endless Geyser of Awesome
A British method for cooking dormouse, as pictured in an 1865 book. Drawing by John Tenniel.
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell
The edible dormouse (Myoxus glis) is the star of Giuseppe Carpaneto and Mauro Cristaldi’s 1994 study “Dormice and Man: A Review of Past and Present Relations.” The two Rome-based scholars—Carpaneto at Terza University, Cristaldi at the University of Rome—savor one of the tasty rodent’s two major historical roles. Though some scorned it an agricultural pest, many prized the critter for its succulence.
Carpaneto and Cristaldi suggest that dormouse cuisine and dormouse documentation owe much to the Romans, and almost nothing to earlier civilizations. “The ancient Greeks,” they write, “were not very interested in dormice because they did not eat them…. Oribatius (Fourth Century A.D.), a Byzantine author on medicine, wrote that their meat is untasty and purgative.”
Carpaneto and Cristaldi tell of how things changed once the Romans got cooking:
“A recipe was reported by the gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicus (First Century A.D.) in his work De Re Coquinaria: dormice were served with sophisticated sauces containing fish and spices (pepper, ‘laserpicium’ pine-seeds) often filled with pork meat and with dormouse entrails. Petronius (20?-66 A.D.) in his novel Satyricon described edible dormice served with honey and poppy-seeds during a luxurious dinner.”
The foodstuff became so well appreciated in Calabria, the southwesternmost part of the Italian mainland, that Calabrian dialects now have about 110 words for dormouse. There are also terms for related items, including dormouse-hunter (agglzjiraru), the jars for keeping dormice (ciglirera), and dormouse litter (carfata).
The earliest known drawing of a dormouse, done in 1607.
Modern dormouse hunting in Calabria is often done at night, by smoke-flushing the animals from their den, or by trapping or shooting. There can be a certain romance to this. The study remarks that “Nocturnal hunting consists of shooting at dormice walking on tree branches, silhouetted against the moon-light.”
In Corsican dormouse cooking, “the animals are eviscerated and burnt but not skinned in order to protect the fat layer between the skin and the muscles. Then they are roasted on a grate and the dripping fat gathered on slices of bread.”
Ukrainian chefs “used the fat of the Edible Dormouse in their cookery,” while the French and some of their neighbors “ate roasted dormice after having thrown them into boiling water.”
Carpaneto and Cristaldi say that Lord Rothschild introduced the edible dormouse into England in 1902. (Other sources specify that this occurred in Tring, Hertfordshire, a neighborhood where dormouse is now nearly impossible to find on a restaurant menu.) But some 37 years earlier, a curious book called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland documented the preparation of dormouse at a British tea party. Midway through the party, a young visitor named Alice reportedly “got up in great disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot.”
“Dormice and Man: A Review of Past and Present Relations,” Giuseppe M. Carpaneto and Mauro Cristaldi, Hystrix, vol. 6, nos. 1-2, 1994, pp. 303-30.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 1865.
“Carolus Linnaeus and the Edible Dormouse,” C. Violani and B. Zava, Hystrix, vol. 6, nos. 1-2, 1994, pp. 109-115. The authors report that:
Carolus Linnaeus was totally unacquainted with the Edible Dormouse Myoxus glis (L.), a species not found in Sweden : while describing Mus Rattus in the 10th Edition of the “Systema Naturae” (1758), the Swedish naturalist confessed his ignorance concerning the “Glis” of the ancients
ALSO SEE: The Dormouse Society
_____________________
The article above is from the May-June 2009 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
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With touch screen technology taking over much of the way we interact with computers it’s fun to remember how we used our clunky old trackballs to scroll through AOL message boards. The Visual History of The Computer Mouse illustrates this evolution. Link
Having cured cancer and other serious ailments, a team of Japanese scientists from the University of Osaka turned to the next most vexing scientific problem facing the world today, the lack of singing mice, and licked that problem too. No seriously. Singing mouse.
A team of researchers at the University of Osaka created the animal in their "Evolved Mouse Project", in which they use genetically modified mice that are prone to miscopying DNA and thus to mutations.
"Mutations are the driving force of evolution. We have cross-bred the genetically modified mice for generations to see what would happen," lead researcher Arikuni Uchimura told AFP.
"We checked the newly born mice one by one… One day we found a mouse that was singing like a bird," he said, noting that the "singing mouse" was born by chance but that the trait will be passed on to future generations.
"I was surprised because I had been expecting mice that are different in physical shape," he said by telephone, adding that in fact the project had also produced "a mouse with short limbs and a tail like a dachshund".
Disney, understandably, should be worried:
Uchimura dreams of further "evolution" of mice through genetic engineering.
"I know it’s a long shot and people would say it’s ‘too absurd’… but I’m doing this with hopes of making a Mickey Mouse some day," he said.
Now, if you were to breed a Frankenmouse, would you really make a singing mouse? I mean, what’s the military application of that?
Video games are great fun, until one day you run smack-dab into the natural order of things. Susanne Wohlfahrt and Marcus Blättermann created this during a four-day animation workshop. -via The Daily What
Showing your emotional side will endear you to the ladies -that is, if you are a mouse! A study led by Kazushige Touhara of the University of Tokyo finds that male mice tears contain a sex pheromone that female mice find irresistible.
Male mice shed tears to keep their eyes from drying out. As they groom themselves, the tears—and the pheromone—get spread around their bodies and nests.
When female mice come in contact with a male or his nest, they pick up the pheromone via a nose organ called the vomeronasal, where the pheromone binds to a specific protein receptor.
“She has to touch it, because this is not a volatile compound like a fragrance,” Touhara said, referring to the ease with which some chemicals turn into vapor.
Upon contact, the pheromone is sent to sex-specific regions in the female’s brain. The female mouse is then three times more likely to engage in what’s called lordosis behavior, a posture shown by many animals in heat in which they thrust their rumps and tails upward.
Humans don’t have the gene code for the chemical or its receptor, so crying isn’t an automatic aphrodisiac. Link -via Holy Kaw!
(Image credit: Joel Sartore, National Geographic)
Adam Savage of the TV show Mythbusters explains an experiment that the Discovery Channel rejected. Did your mother ever say “The box is more nutritious!” when you asked for sugary cereal? Adam and Jamie set up a test to find out if that’s true, which turned out completely different from anything they expected. This is an excerpt from Savage’s speech at Maker Faire. Subject matter may be disturbing to some viewers. You can watch the entire speech at FORA.tv. Link -via Digg
Take a closer look at the Mouse and Cat drawing by Margaret Shepherd, and you’ll see that the cat and mouse literally spell their names!
See more examples of Margaret’s excellent calligraphy art over at the Neatorama Spotlight: Link
The game Record Tripping uses only your mouse, and mostly just the scroll wheel. Figure out your goal as you go along, which gets more difficult in the upper levels. The graphics are nice, but you might want to turn the sound down if you find it as distracting as I did. Link -via b3ta
The cute little mouse in this commercial unfortunately gets caught in a mouse trap, since he can’t resist the tasty piece of cheddar laying there. The good thing is that it’s the kind of cheese that comes with a slogan that says “Seriously Strong”.
Link [YouTube]
Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) affects many computer users, and can be frequently associated with conventional mouse usage. Now there is a new version of Mouse Click available for those who may need the relief.
MouseClick waits until the mouse stops moving and sends a click. The application supports left, right and double clicks and when Smart Drag is selected MouseClick can drag windows, scrollbars and other elements.
MouseClick supports Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Click the screenshot to enlarge them.
I assume it’s equipped to discern between a Link, and a link with a hover option. via Minimal. (Photo from jen_gingerich’s Photobucket album.)
Scientists are working on unconventional methods for controlling neurons in the brain. In one such experiment, a mouse’s behavior was controlled by shining a light directly on its brain! But this was no ordinary brain -the mouse had DNA from algae inserted into its neurons, which made them responsive to light. The crucial part of these experiments is making the new genes active in only certain types of neurons, depending on the outcome we are looking for. Stanford psychiatrist Karl Deisseroth and his team are experimenting with optogenetics to help victims of Parkinson’s disease, starting with mice.
Many experts had thought the cure was to stimulate certain kinds of cells within the subthalamic nucleus, which coordinates motion. But when they tried that, it had no effect whatsoever. Then two of Deisseroth’s grad students began experimenting with a dark-horse idea. They stimulated neurons near the surface of the brain that send signals into the subthalamic nucleus — a much harder approach because it meant working at one remove. It was as if, instead of using scissors yourself, you had to guide someone else’s hands to make the cuts.
Their idea worked. The mice walked. In their paper, published in April 2009, they wrote that the “effects were not subtle; indeed, in nearly every case these severely parkinsonian animals were restored to behavior indistinguishable from normal.”
Other experiments on rhesus monkeys show promise. The team is now designing ways to make optogenetics safe and effective for humans. Link
(image credit: Justin Wood)
Princeton neuroscientist David Tank wanted to study individual neurons in a mouse’s hippocamus as it moves. But the movement of the mouse’s body prevented accurate readings. So he placed the mouse on a giant trackball and let it run through a virtual maze from the video game Quake 2 displayed on screens. Brandon Keim writes in Wired:
Studying individual neurons has been possible in cell cultures, but brains in a dish behave different than real, living brains. Tracking individual neurons in moving animals has been impossible.
“The neurons move back and forth while you’re trying to measure things,” said Tank. “So we developed a way to keep the head fixed in space, but still have mice perform behaviors that are usually studied in mice running through a maze.”
Tank’s team designed an apparatus in which a mouse, its head firmly held in a metal helmet, walks on the surface of a styrofoam ball. The ball is kept aloft by a jet of air, so that it functions like a multidirectional treadmill. Around it are sensors taken from optical computer mice, which read the ball’s movement as the mouse runs.
Those readings were the input for the researchers’ virtual reality software — a modified version of the open source Quake 2 videogame engine, tweaked to project an image on a screen surrounding the mouse. Tank called it “a mini-IMAX theater.”
Link via Popular Science
What do you get when you combine taxidermy with gadget hacking? Instructables users noahw and canida released the step-by-step instruction on how to make your very own taxidermied computer mouse: Link – via Rue The Day!
Two students from a technical high school in Argentina built a mouse that can be controlled by eye movements, thus allowing people with total paralysis to use the computer.
The invention is named the "Eye Mouse." This idea is not new but what makes it different is that it is a DIY mouse that almost anyone can build with cheap and easy-to-find components.
How does it work? The free software that they provide, divides the monitor surface in squares and asks the user what he wants to do – focus on an area, right click, left click, etc – with yes and no answers. If the eye looks at the camera, that is translated as a "yes".
With just a webcam, an infrared LED, a small, flexible metal tube and the headband of a welding helmet, anyone can build the mouse at a fraction of the cost of similar devices.
The students wanted to make the Eye Mouse available to everyone, so the software is free. They have published step-by-step instructions on how to build the mouse, originally in Spanish but they have already been translated to English.
Link – via ticbelgrano
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by scbr.
Here’s a great picture of a three-layer love fest. I almost wish there was a tiny flea on the rat just to make things even better. Best. Picture. Ever. I especially love that it wasn’t staged, the photographer just happened across this freak occurrence.
A deadly fire that killed nearly 100 cats at an animal shelter in Toronto, Canada, was caused by …. mice!
The fire at the humane society shelter in Oshawa also killed three dogs and some rats that were up for adoption.
An initial report from the fire marshal says mice or rats chewing through electrical wires in the ceiling are likely to have sparked the blaze.
Two mirrors, a little bait, and a camera. Put them together and you have Mother Nature making a kaleidoscope! Music by the Swiss band Larytta. Video directed by Körner Union. A pleasant way to spend three minutes. Link (embedded YouTube clip).
Wired celebrates the 40th anniversary of the unveiling of the first computer mouse on December 9th, 1968.
Computer scientist Douglas Engelbart kicks off the personal computer revolution with a product demonstration that is so amazing it inspires a generation of technologists. It will become known as “the mother of all demos.”
The presentation included the debut of the computer mouse, which Engelbart used to control an onscreen pointer in exactly the same way we do today. For a world used to thinking of computers as impersonal boxes that read punched cards, whir awhile, then spit out reams of teletype paper, this kind of real-time graphical control was amazing enough.
Englebert also demonstrated other computer abilities such as hyperlinks, windows, and videoconferencing, among other ideas we use today, although it took the computer industry decades to implement them. Link
In addition, Wired has a gallery showing the evolution of the computer mouse. Link
(image credit: SRI International)
Do all those web browsing and mousing around make your wrist tired? Perhaps you’re not getting the necessary wrist support. Well, you can remedy that with this brilliant product: the white bread wrist support! Link
I’ve certainly heard of training dogs, cats, parrots and almost every other animal under the Sun to do tricks but trained mice is something new to me. This little video presents Brain Storm who has been trained to run through a dastardly tough looking course. However, she prevails with the awesome Olympic Fanfare Theme by John Williams playing in the background to help her speed to victory and glory! Oh, and please don’t get too squeamish over the mouse or the mousey leftovers on the table.
And the judges have their score cards ready: 9.0, 9.0, 9.5, 9.0, 10.0! It’s a new record!
More info on Brain Storm and other mice here – Link
Behold the glowing, ember-filled furnace steampunk mouse that would look
perfectly in place next to Babbage’s Analytical Engine (what’s that?). As if this mouse isn’t cool (hot?) enough, the maker just created v2.0: the twin furnace mouse!
Link (with build-log goodness) – via Brass Goggles
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The device itself is fairly simple: a small flexible circuit board inside a body that is composed of plastic and can be blown up manually. When not in use, it can be de-flated and folded into a compact size or slid between the screen and keyboard of your laptop when it’s closed.
Source: Gizmodo
